Hydraulic Cities, Colonial Catastrophes, and Nomadic Empires: Human-Environment Interactions in Asia

Abstract

Recent and projected changes in climate highlight the need to understand and predict human-environment interactions. However the diversity of cultures, livelihoods, and political formations today and in the past indicate that relationships between climate, ecosystems, and societies are likely non-linear, complex, and variable over time. A growing network of multi-millennial, absolutely dated annual tree-ring records from Asia provide climatic context for several important historic events which emphasize the diversity of human-environment interactions. Tree rings are an ideal proxy for understanding these relationships due to their extensive spatial coverage, temporal resolution relevant to human systems, and their ability to integrate climate in ways that relate directly to human livelihoods. Herein, we focus on five examples of human-environment interactions in two climatically and culturally distinct regions of Asia: Monsoon and Arid Central Asia. Over the last three millennia, societies have adjusted to climate variability in diverse and (mal)adaptive ways. In Monsoon Asia, drastic swings in moisture availability, notably megadroughts associated with monsoon failure, interacted with socio-political and technical institutions to spur the disintegration of the fourteenth century Khmer kingdom at Angkor and engender continental scale famine in nineteenth century colonial Asia. In Arid Central Asia, elevated temperatures and moisture were both a boon and a limitation for historic and modern nomadic pastoralists, depending on the historical context in which climatic events occurred. Future efforts to statistically model and predict human-environment relationships over the arc of human history in Asia will need to account for the diversity of economic, political, and cultural features that filter, dampen, and amplify the effects of climate change on society.